Contemporary Korean Catholicism: Major Challenges and Opportunities

This lecture focuses on three things, the impact of the economic prosperity of Korean society as a whole on the character of Korean Catholicism (a church of the middle class, materialism, stand on social justice, ideological struggles, relativization of the church as an institution), internal challenges (pastoral issues of a rapidly growing Catholic population, declining numbers of clergy and religious, relation to other religions, initiatives on reunification, global issues), and the central challenge of clerical authoritarianism with its strength and weakness vis-à-vis increasingly well-educated laity.